Ok I have a question about HD cameras. Do you need a computer with a bigger hard drive than 100 GB to have an HD camera? say you film about 10 mins worth. now is the HD going to take up all your space when importing?
I imported a one-hour HDV tape (shot at 1080i with my Sony HC3 Handycam) and it consumed about 15GB of hard drive space. Not too bad.
I guess that's the thing about HDV...it's compressed to the size of Mini-DV. I can report that the newer HDV cameras are not plagued by compression artifacts, at least not to my eyes.
Uncompressed HD, however, would be a different story. It's got to consume gobs of hard drive space.
canon XL 1 or 2 is SD. XLH1 is the HD version. And thats gonna set u back about $9k? So if you cant afford the HD space consider the HVX plus p2 and then you have $$ left over for more HDD space.